Infinite information, endless entertainment, ceaseless chat rooms, all accessible and available in one click, swipe, scroll or tap.
With all this at our fingertips, technology is literally rewiring our brains.
With one click of a button, almost anything can be at your front door within 24 hours. Wether this be your favourite late night snack from Deliveroo, a book you've been meaning to read from Amazon, your groceries you ordered from Tesco Online - literally anything and everything can be given to you almost instantaneously. You can even instantaneously strike up a romantic partner now - there are approximately 50 million romantic candidates right at your fingertips, waiting for you to filter them by location, sexuality, religion and hobbies. Even a good laugh can figuratively be delivered to you - all you have to do is press play on Netflix.
While this is the new norm, it is a relatively new phenomenon referred to as instant gratification, and frankly it is extremely damaging.
Instant gratification is the need to experience fulfillment without any sort of delay or wait.
A whole generation that is growing up without barriers of time and delay, with endless means of gratification at their disposal have been rewired psychologically by technology.
These easy means of gratification have repercussions beyond effortless purchasing power; a generation that experiences less and less waits in its daily purchases and habits and hobbies will eventually come to possess less and less patience. When it comes to matters of accelerating in your professional field, raising a child, forming new long term relationships, this growing impatience will have deadly consequences and will be difficult to manage.
Think about it. We get irked when our same day Amazon package doesn't arrive on time. How will we deal with the cruel, timely nature of reality and growing up?
Letting the excitement of instant gratification deteriorate your patience will lead to weighty problems. For instance, diagnosis of attention deficit disorder in children have skyrocketed in the last decade, and even the amount of adults being prescribed medication has soared. In essence, society is losing its ability to focus.
With the abundance of technology and availability of instantaneous gratification, it’s important to remember how important patience can be, because the most beneficial things in life are more than a same day delivery away.
